“Syncretism | Infinity and a Rose,” an immersive exhibition curated by Maxim Didenko at Moscow’s Solyanka Gallery, was built on the life’s work of Pavel Semchenko—paintings and objects from twenty-five years of practice, including his years as a co-founder of the AKHE theatre. Conceived as a retrospective, it ran for three weeks, from February 16th to March 8th, and took over all sixteen of Solyanka’s rooms, from conventional galleries to stairwells and basements. It came with a series of live performances by well-known Russian artists: painting, film, installation, music, theatre, and dance were thrown together, and performers, musicians, and artists including Vladimir Varnava, Vladimir Volkov, Oleg Zhukovskiy, and Anisiya Kronidova staged daily happenings, many of them unexpected and interactive. The starting question was what separates “dead” art from “living” art. Syncretism here meant a whimsical attempt to combine “impossible” objects and scenes, in search of a new artistic normal; the happenings gave visitors an uneven, distorted experience of the gallery, in which paintings and installations came alive through specially made sound, light, and performance.

​

Visitors were drawn into a distorted reality by way of experimental communication. The gallery became a playing field for artists—Semchenko’s followers and admirers—and for an audience that could meet his work through digital media, with the eyes and with the body. They could even “destroy” art: in a dedicated vandalism room, Semchenko’s recorded voice told them to “take the paint, scissors or glue” and go to work on his original prints, and the vandalized pieces stayed on display. Some visitors became works of art themselves. At evening life-drawing sessions with live music, the lucky ones lay down in the “capsule of infinity,” a transparent, coffin-like structure; their image was projected and turned into live video art while Semchenko painted them on canvas, streamed live on YouTube and Facebook.